Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic contrasts the attitudes of mathematicians and physicists toward computational proof tools like Wolfram Mathematica. In the first panel, labeled "In Mathematics," a professor reviews a stude

This comic subverts the common put-down that a man driving an expensive sports car "must be compensating for a tiny penis." Two men see a flashy red sports car and one makes exactly that remark. His b

This comic explores why movie villains almost always use robot henchmen rather than human soldiers. A child asks his father why this is the case, and the father launches into an elaborate philosophica

This comic satirizes the way intellectuals sometimes use scientific knowledge as a roundabout mating strategy. A red-haired woman with glasses approaches a man and announces she'''d like to discuss ho

This comic uses the format of a werewolf transformation story to parody the experience of becoming a lazy, unmotivated person. A man desperately tells his girlfriend she can'''t dump him because he wa

This comic is formatted as a physics exam answer rather than a traditional comic strip. The problem asks students to calculate when a 5-kilogram ball, shot horizontally at 20 meters per second from a

This comic imagines what would happen if economics and engineering departments had a joint luncheon, and the result is a cascade of interdisciplinary misunderstandings. The engineers ask naive-soundin

This comic, titled "How Stress Works," satirizes the no-win cycle of stress and guilt that many people experience. In the first panel, a character happily declares, "Agh! I'''m too stressed. I should

This comic proposes an "Event Idea: Festival of Ad Hoc Biological Adaptation Hypotheses." A presenter at a lectern argues that babies are shaped like footballs and have flexible bones because "primiti

In the first panel, a woman at a bar suggestively tells a man, "Hey there. How about we go to the restroom, lock the door, and I blow your mind." The scene then cuts to "Soon..." where they are indeed

This comic imagines a future where advanced 3D printers have become common, enabling "an entirely new class of pranks." It presents three tiers: The "Basic Prank" ("Ghost from the Machine") involves r

In this comic, a couple is in bed, apparently engaged in a roleplay scenario where he is a "coach" and she is a "sexy gymnast." However, the man suddenly has an existential crisis mid-roleplay: "Wait.

This comic depicts a surveillance drone telling a citizen "Hello citizen. I'll be monitoring you on your walk today! Enjoy your safety." When the man protests that this is a violation of his privacy,

In this comic, a man warns his partner before sex that he has "very potent seed." She points out that he is wearing a condom and she is on birth control, but he insists "It doesn't matter!" He then la

The comic is titled "Automatic Email Signatures Are the Worst Thing in History." It shows an email with the subject line "Goodbye," containing an intensely emotional breakup message: "We can no longer

This comic features two robots sitting under a starry sky, discussing whether humans are capable of love. One robot argues that humans are not truly capable of love in any meaningful sense, citing sev

The comic shows two men who appear to be 18th- or 19th-century intellectuals sitting at a table with tea, and the caption reads "Before Economics." One says, "Hey, you know how we sit around every nig

This comic follows a man visiting the "Department of Lies." When he arrives, the woman at the desk confirms it is indeed the Department of Lies, and the visitor immediately tries to catch them in a li

The comic presents a conspiracy theorist who takes two real observations -- that population growth in developed countries follows a logistic curve (rising, slowing, then leveling off) and that computi

This comic is labeled "Big Idea #23571926: Macabre Bumper Stickers." It shows the back of a car with a bumper sticker that reads: "My honor student metamorphosed into this bumper, and no science has y

The comic shows a couple on what appears to be a date. The woman asks why her partner is so quiet tonight, and he deflects with "Don't worry about it." When she presses him, he finally reveals what's

The comic depicts a TV presenter cheerfully describing a reality show concept: C-list celebrities are placed in a giant cylinder where they struggle to reach the top for air, the dead are cleared out

The comic shows a woman playing a video game on the couch while a man approaches and asks, "Aren't you worried about the cost?" She replies that there's no cost beyond the price of the game. He then e

The comic shows two hunters hiding in bushes near a trap set in a forest. The trap is a classic snare -- a rope noose on the ground with bait in the center. The bait is a box labeled "You're Free Thes

This comic tackles the classic philosophical "Problem of Evil" -- the argument that the existence of evil in the world is incompatible with an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God. A red-hai

This comic imagines what would happen if Shakespeare's *Hamlet* were set in a world with modern forensic science. A police officer tells Prince Hamlet that forensic analysis has determined with 100% c

This comic, titled "The Relationship-Grammar Test," shows a man presenting a woman with a card that reads "YOUR FAT." The punchline is in the instructions below: an offended person is "too bad at gram

This comic, titled "Scarcity," is a long-form text piece (a format Weinersmith occasionally uses) depicting a conversation between a fat man and a woman about economics. The man explains that economic

This comic features two people lying under the stars, having a late-night philosophical conversation. One asks "If the whole universe is just energy wobbles, what's the point of it all?" The other com

This comic shows a patient eagerly asking a doctor to confirm a self-diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome, explaining that he scowled at a girl who called him handsome. The doctor corrects him: no, if he'

This comic imagines a caveman-era computer science class where a teacher asks students to explain the "frogSort" algorithm. A student describes a sorting algorithm that uses frogs: you place a number

This comic introduces the concept of a "Graphograph" -- a made-up word defined as "a word in which a letter within the word represents a function related to the word." The character gives three exampl

This comic depicts a parent trying to give a child "the talk" about sex, explaining that mommies and daddies have sex to make babies. The child, who is apparently a budding statistician, immediately o

This comic shows a woman passionately declaring that "everyone thinks they're born special, but nobody is" and that you achieve specialness through "hard work, thought, and struggle." The man then ask

In this comic, a man named Frank attempts to confess to his wife about infidelity, but frames it using increasingly convoluted economic and legal reasoning. He says he "had to sell my body" to pay for

This comic features a young boy confiding his romantic dilemmas to his imaginary friend -- an apatosaurus dinosaur. The boy shares typical childhood relationship worries: whether Sally likes him or ju

This comic contrasts "Child Fantasies" with "Adult Fantasies." In the top panel, a girl daydreams that "Sally Jenkins is the first female NFL quarterback detective Jedi to be Batman" -- a wild, maxima

This comic presents a darkly humorous twist on the simulation argument, a philosophical idea popularized by Nick Bostrom. The setup explains the standard reasoning: if it is possible to create simulat

This single-panel comic is titled "Life Tip: Don't Die in Debt to a Loved One." It shows a man delivering a eulogy at a funeral, saying: "He failed at every goal that ever mattered to him. This is one

This single-panel comic is titled "Never Sleep with an Artist." It shows two men in bed after an apparently unsatisfying sexual encounter. One says: "That wasn't *bad* sex! That was a performance piec

This comic imagines a couple treating sex with the rigor of academic mathematics. A man excitedly announces he has "discovered a new form of sex" and they rush to the "laboratory" to test it. Afterwar

This single-panel comic shows a man in bed trying to convince his uninterested partner to have sex by invoking quantum mechanics: "Aww come on, baby... according to quantum mechanics, there's some pro

This comic is titled "My Fantasy: Build an A.I. Smart Enough to Misunderstand Puns." In the single panel, a red-haired person tells a pun to a dark-haired woman: "Why are florists great kissers? They

This comic contrasts two tombstone inscriptions under the headings "What You Fear" and "What You Should Fear." Under "What You Fear," the gravestone reads: "No one took him seriously." Under "What You

This comic reimagines the famous fence-painting scene from Mark Twain'''s "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" with a much more cynical and manipulative Tom Sawyer figure (here called Bobby). In the origina

This comic presents a graph with "Happiness" on the y-axis and "Time Spent Thinking About the Future or the Past" on the x-axis. The red curve shows that happiness initially rises as you spend a littl

This comic features a philosopher giving a lecture that begins by quoting Albert Camus: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not wo

This comic imagines King Arthur on a date, trying to disclose his baggage before the relationship gets serious. He tells his date: "Before we go any further, you should know I once accidentally slept

This comic explores the idea that the "miracle of Christmas" is how normally undesirable foods are magically transmuted into deliciousness during the holiday season. A child in a Sunday school setting

This comic imagines the origin story of Shakespeare'''s "Romeo and Juliet" as a petty act of parental revenge. Shakespeare is traveling with his family toward London when his young son says, "Daddy! I